View source for The Cheese and the Worms

{{Infobox book
| name			 = The Cheese and the Worms; The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller 
| author         = Carlo Ginzburg
| publisher      = Johns Hopkins University Press
| pub_date       = 1980
| pages          = 208
| isbn           = 0801843871
| image          = [[File:TheCheeseand theWorms.jpg|200px|alt=cover]]
}}Carlo Ginzburg’s seminal work about a northwestern Italian miller subjected to the Inquisition raises a number of important points regarding peasant modes of thinking, the intersection of popular and high culture, and the cultural and social impacts of contemporaneous religious and literary texts. Ginzburg’s analysis of these wide-ranging concepts uses a very specific lens – the records of the trial of a Friulian miller, Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio. He argues that Mennocchio’s unique ideas regarding religious tolerance and a “radical renewal of society” (xxii) had their origins in a combination of oral peasant tradition and textual sources. Mennochio’s reading and comprehension of these texts and oral traditions allowed him to create his own cosmogony in which he envisioned “the primordial cheese from which the worm-angels are produced” (20). His vision of a New World, as Ginzburg contends, is thus rooted in “an autonomous current of peasant radicalism, which the upheaval of the Reformation helped to bring forth, but which was much older” (21). 

In brief summary, Mennocchio’s literacy proves to be his undoing. Otherwise, quite ordinary (he is a miller, has eleven children and some social prominence as town mayor), his self-proclaimed “artful mind” digested textual meaning and reinterpreted it in ways that were innovative and radical for his times. As Ginzburg indicates, “his interpretive filter was far more important that the ‘source’ itself.  Even if Menocchio’s interpretation was triggered by contact with [the] text, its roots had distant origins” (41). His filtering of certain particular words and phrases ultimately combined to create his vision of a primordial chaos in which he testified during his trial that he believed that “all was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together…” (52). In fact, Ginzburg goes on to emphasize that Mennochio probably didn’t get the bulk of this idea from books – he was relatively untouched by Reformation-era thought on the various sacraments and religious rituals. Rather, he read text content (Ginzburg points to eleven books listed in the trial records) in a selective manner meant to shore up certain ideas he already had in place. Though certain words and phrases from his reading allowed him more eloquence and explanatory depth, he more likely drew upon everyday sights to create his metaphors. Hence, familiar experiences, such as maggots appearing in decomposed cheese, in turn impelled him to make “explanatory analogies” (57) for his beliefs. This grounding in the physicality of daily life and experiences prompted Mennochio to envision a very specific kind of cosmogony – one in which the world could not have been divinely created (56), where God is a lord and father, but not the creator, and there was no Trinity (64, 101). He also imagined Church hierarchy as a corrupt “them” aligned against “us” (the peasants or people). For this heresy, he was tried and imprisoned twice, and ultimately burned at the stake. 

Similar to Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre, Ginzburg is careful to distinguish between “mentality” versus “culture,” warning that we must not place Mennochio’s beliefs in a vacuum outside peasant culture’s “elemental, instinctive materialism” (60). His beliefs, as Ginzburg argues, are part of the deep-rooted peasant myth, underlying an instinctive understanding of science that they used to explain the world. Ginzburg even intimates that we cannot rule out the existence of a shamanistic cult in the Friuli that may have been perpetuating this oral tradition. This peasant culture was “intolerant of dogma and ritual, tied to the cycles of nature and fundamentally pre-Christian” (112). In a lengthy footnote, however, Ginzburg is careful to explain that this peasant culture and the “high” culture of the Reformation-age were, at least, linked in a “circular (reciprocal) relationship” (155) that “traveled from low to high as well as from high to low” (xii). Ginzburg demonstrates that while Menocchio in classic peasant tradition, rejected the abstractness of Reformation-era Christianity, he nevertheless was heavily engaged with and participated in the ongoing circular context of dominant and subordinate sixteenth-century culture. His ideas of tolerance and Church corruption were later incorporated into popular culture, even as they continued to be part of the cycle of “repression and effacement” (126). 


[[Category:Early Modern European History]]
[[Category:Carlo Ginzburg]]
[[Category:Wikify]]
[[Category:Book Summaries]]